Association of Contemporary Church Historians

(Arbeitsgemeinschaft kirchlicher Zeitgeschichtler)

Contents

Vancouver, B.C.

Dear Friends,

1) Dietrich Bonhoeffer

To mark Bonhoeffer's ninetieth birthday, the International
Bonhoeffer Society organised its 7th Congress in Cape Town, under
the capable leadership of John de Gruchy, attended by 280 scholars
from all continents, which undoubtedly helped to recognise that,
in the new South Africa, the universities are now welcomed back
as fully members of the international scholarly community.

John Moses reports that a number of African speakers who had
been prominent opponents and victims of apartheid bore testimony
to the relevance of Bonhoeffer's witness in their situation. John
himself delivered a paper on "Bonhoeffer reception in the
GDR 1945-89", which was much appreciated by several former
East Germans, many of whom had formed cells of Bonhoeffer students,
drawing inspiration from his works. The proceedings will be published
by Erdmanns in the USA.

Meanwhile in Germany, new efforts are being made to overturn
the legal rulings by SS courts, under which Bonhoeffer was condemned
to death, which are still considered to be in force. Legal rehabilitation
would finally put an end to the defamatory view that Bonhoeffer
was a "traitor" to his nation, an opinion which was
still widely held in the 1950s as for instance by a 1956 court
which upheld "the right of the state to maintain itself"
against such "dissident elements".

In the United States and Canada, a new initiative has started
a new Internet forum on Bonhoeffer. To subscribe, send a message
to LISTPROC2@bgu.edu with the text
SUBSCRIBE BONHF-L Your name

2) New Books:

It gives me great pleasure to introduce to you a first rate
study by a Canadian author, which has significant findings for
us all.

Duff Crerar, Padres in No Man's Land. Canadian chaplains in
the Great War. (McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion,
16), McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal and Kingston 1995,
xvi + 424 pp, Can$ 39.95 Duff Crerar's excellent description of
the Canadian military chaplaincy during the first world war does
much more than cover a long-neglected and largely unknown chapter
in Canadian ecclesiastical and military history. This account
of how the Canadian church mobilized its manpower in response
to the call to arms should be read by friend and foe alike, because
the issues raised were, and still are, relevant not only to the
events of eighty years ago, or to the troops of a minor overseas
participant. Through his careful research, his generous and tolerant
ecumenical tone, and his obvious sympathy for those involved,
Crerar has given us a significant and heartfelt tribute to the
men who served their country with such devotion. It deserves to
be read and studied, not just by Canadians, but by anyone concerned
with the successes and failures of Christian witness in the twentieth
century.

The Canadian chaplaincy service began in a bumbling amateur
fashion, high on inflated patriotic rhetoric, strongly influenced
by political and social jobbery and lacking in support from either
the military authorities or even its home church constituency.
Crerar's opening chapter describes the organization of the service
under a self-seeking opinionated Anglican clergyman with connections
to the Orange lodges of southern Ontario, whose inadequacies finally
led to a revolt from his own staff. Not until 1916, when John
Almond of Montreal took over, did the chaplaincy gain an effective
presence, and establish its credibility with both the military
and civilian authorities. By 1918 Almond had command of a multi-
denominational force of dedicated priests, whose prowess in the
field and the gratitude they had earned from the soldiers would,
he believed, be indispensable for the spiritul regeneration of
post-war Canada.

Crerar's writing becomes more vivid as he describes the padres'
progress from home parish to battalion or division headquarters,
to assembly points and training camps, to overseas staging areas,
and to the initial and often prolonged stay in England. It was
often a disillusioning process. The padres preached a heady mixture
of personal consecration, moral purity, duty and self-sacrifice.
But they were often appalled to find that their men preferred
to find solace in drunkenness, profanity and sexual misconduct
in order to alleviate the disruptions and boredoms of army life.
Equally depressing was the frequent disdain and lack of support
from commanding officers. A continuing battle ensued with the
army medical service's attempts to combat venereal disease by
adequate prophylactic devices and lectures, which the chaplains
could only regard as an open invitation to immorality. Compulsory
church parades proved to be counter-productive to any real spiritual
growth, as chaplains struggled to get a hearing from reluctant
audiences, who increasingly resented this usurpation of their
spare time. By contrast hospital visiting offered the chance to
admire the quiet courage and heroic endurance of the wounded,
which helped to relieve the chaplains' sense of fatigue and discouragement.
"In their progress towards the front, chaplains passed through
a powerful psychological process in which they increasingly identified
with the soldier, idealized his character and ascribed a sacramental
quality to his endurance and loyalty." (p.109).

The following chapters on the chaplain's service in the field
of battle are most moving. Despite Army regulations barring non-
combatants from the trenches, chaplains increasingly recognized
that their hold on the men grew as they shared the perils and
dangers of the front lines In the face of so much death, the chaplains
refused to accept their original relegation to the rear. >From
1916 onwards, the terrible demands of attritional trench warfare
made morale a compelling concern to the military leaders, and
the chaplains' role was correspondingly upgraded. But despite
their displays of heroism and valour, the mood of the chaplains'
reports shifted from optimism to grim endurance. The awful toll
of the casualty rates, and the suffering they daily.witnessed
in the dressing stations and field hospitals, belied the patriotic
rhetoric of earlier years. Their underlying assumption that moral
courage and spiritual devotion would surely triumph, and their
constant sermons on the virtues of decency, duty, obedience and
sacrifice, now had to be re-thought. Increasingly they came to
place their hopes on the prospects of a post-war revival and renewal.
Most of the chaplains testified that their years overseas had
been an edifying and deepening experience for them, and were sure
that the comradeship of the battle-fields would continue and give
them strength in their post-war lives.

After November 1918 the chaplains were convinced that victory
proved that God had been on their side. Their war-time idealism
and fellowship could and should be transplanted to the parishes,
and translated into a grand crusade for the realization of the
coming Kingdom of God. They called for reforms in both church
and state. They advocated the democratization of church structures,
the updating of archaic liturgies, the abandonment of sectarian
denominationalism, and the promotion of an active social gospel.
They sought political reforms with a strongly socialist tendency.
In short, as Crerar convincingly points out, the war confirmed
the kind of national idealism and evangelical fervour they had
learnt in the pre-war seminaries.

But the results were highly disillusioning. Neither the Church
nor the state authorities were willing to take their advice. The
government rapidly dismantled the chaplaincy service. The churches
sidelined the returning veterans, and many were too burnt out
to mobilize support for their millenial campign for post-war regeneration.
Few Canadians seems to be listening for such a clarion call to
action.

Crerar clearly takes the chaplains' side in blaming the ecclesiastical
and government leaders for not responding to this opportunity,
even though he admits that the radicalism of many chaplains evaporated
as they returned to parish duties. Their vision faded as internal
struggles in both church and state took up more energy and attention.

But in fact Crerar's charitable appreciation of the chaplains'
endeavours fails to look at the larger picture. After 1918, a
world- wide wave of scepticism cast corrosive doubts upon the
credibility of all Christian churches. Increasingly Christians
were challenged to face the question they had avoided before -
and which Crerar skirts around - how could such a war, with such
appalling losses, be reconciled with the Gospel of Jesus, the
Prince of Peace? How could each of the warring sides have made
such confident, but mutually contradictory, appeals to the same
God, or have claimed to have had divine approval for such murderous
slaughter? The chaplains' readiness to portray the war in moral
and spiritual terms, the propagation of the idea of personal sacrifice
and death as a means of moral regeneration, the invocation of
the spirit of militarism, the demonization of the nations' enemies,
and the belief that the testing of war would lead the populations
back to the churches, all now came back to haunt the proponents
of this religious patriotism. The cynical anger expressed in the
anti-war literature of the late 1920s and 1930s not merely attacked
these warrior-priests as hypocrites, but more fundamentally challenged
the faith they had sought to uphold. It would not be too much
to say that much of Christianity has never recovered from these
disastrous wounds.

John S.Conway
University of British Columbia

3) Just arrived today:

Doris Bergen, Twisted Cross. The German Christian Movement
in the Third Reich, University of North Carolina Press 1996.

Congratulations, Doris!.

To be reviewed in my next Newsletter.

4)The Church in the Palatinate (continued)

Following my review of H.Reichrath's biography of Landesbischof
Diehl (Newsletter no 12), I received a sharply critical letter
from the publisher, accusing me of portraying the Pfalz Church
in overly black (mainly) and white terms. Fortunately we now have
a more scholarly, if brief, account in the two chapters by K.H.Debus
in eds. G.Nestler and H.Ziegler, Die Pfalz unterm Hakenkreuz,
Pfalzische Verlagsanstalt 1993, pp 227-292, which reproduces the
text of Diehl's declaration on the occasion of the National Plebiscite
of 19 August 1934:

A Lenten thought from 2 Timothy 4: 2-4:
Preach the Word; be persistent whether the time is favourable
or unfavourable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost
patience in teaching. For the time is coming when people will
not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, will
turn to teachers to suit their own desires. They will not listen
to the truth, but instead will wander away to myths.